Subscription Management

In the hosting business, a subscription is a presentation of a contract on service usage between a subscriber and the service provider or its reseller. In some cases, an application can monitor and manage a subscription used to provide the application services.

Subscription Types

Both parts of the platforms, OSS (operations support system) and BSS (business support system) operate own set of subscriptions coupled tightly to each other on the one-to-one basis. It means when BSS creates a subscription with services provided through OSS and assigns an internal ID to its subscription, in the same process, OSS creates a coupled subscription with the same internal ID. In BSS, a subscription contains commercial data, while in OSS a subscription contains a list of resources with their parameters, current usage, and limits.

To monitor and manage the described above subscriptions in the platform, APS provides the respective APS types:

• Subscription is used to represent the OSS subscriptions. When a subscription is created in OSS, the respective APS resource is created from the Subscription APS type. The APS resource allows applications to get resource usage and limits in the subscription it represents.
• SubscriptionService is normally implemented by an APS application to provision its main singular resource (management context) in the customer subscription. The resource is directly linked with the APS subscription resource. This helps applications identify the subscriptions their resources belong to.

When developing and integrating a cloud multi-tenant application with the platform, a developer should consider the following subscription management modes for provisioning the application services.

Account-Wide Subscription Services (AWS)

This is the default subscription management mode.

A customer may have only one tenant on the external system and several subscriptions in the platform containing resources from the application. On the platform side, the application manages subscriptions of an account in terms of choosing a subscription for provisioning or updating services in it.

On the external system, all resources of a customer are joined in the scope of the respective tenant regardless of their inclusion in subscriptions.

Multiple Subscription Services (MSS)

A customer may have several subscriptions containing services of the same application. Each subscription maps to a separate tenant on the external system thus making the resources in different subscriptions isolated from each other.

A customer must be ready to have a separate tenant with unique credentials on the external system for each subscription in the platform.

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